Chrysaor pushed away his father’s arms where they held him and once again threw himself to the ground, this time with his lips against Cunmar’s feet in their perfumed sandals, which were threaded with silver, and he moaned in his disbelief, which we all shared, and renewed his pleas.
‘I’m not speaking for myself! How could you think I would be so base and underhand to couch a sorrow of my own in the guise of public wrong? I was obedient to you in the matter of my marriage, when you summoned me here to introduce me to the bride you’d chosen for me. As I made the journey from the capital, I didn’t yet know what the circumstances were, and you hadn’t then decided to take her yourself. I’m your son who loves and honours you in all things and is bound by your commands. It isn’t the character of the bride that I find wanting – she’s delightful, of course, I freely admit. It’s her lack of . . . status, rank, family, ties, belonging, the unfortunate fate that has made her what she is: a cast-off from her native land, someone who doesn’t belong here or anywhere and cannot, who has survived only through the mercy of your arrangements for the proliferating unbelievers, infidels, outcasts and strangers who live in proximity to us in Cadenas. She is impure, by birth, by upbringing, by chance and by choice: her conduct with you shows it.’
His tears splashed his father’s feet as he held him by the ankles and railed: ‘My mother’s virtuous, loyal, and loves you chastely – don’t dishonour her. Don’t marry this young woman. Keep her in your bed till you tire of her. As you’ve done before. But don’t share my mother’s state with this stranger to our ways.’
Cunmar lifted Chrysaor to his feet once again, but this time he wasn’t weeping, but angry, for his eyes were screwed up as if he was facing blind into the sun.
‘I’ll go to your mother now,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to her, to make her understand that I mean no disrespect to her . . . but I have other needs.’
So he left the hall and us who were gathered there, with a single glance to Leto where she whimpered and words of command to the assembly: ‘Take her to her rooms – this marriage will take place another day.’
4
Hortense to Kim
Subject: Skipwith 673
Date: Tues, 16 June 199– 12:14:32 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Kim, What are you asking me – and all those other people out there – to believe? I confess I’m at a loss. We’re looking at a heap of miscellaneous manuscripts, jumbled together in a tomb by a fluke of history – or, if you like, the hunger of imperialist antique hunters – and you’re asking me to accept that this is some continuous story about a single individual – who doesn’t die either? In haste, Hetty
5
In the Necropolis
[Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 72]
. . . A daughter, a son, twins, twin babies: she could not quite say ‘my’ daughter, ‘my’ son – on account of them she had been exposed, driven out, left to die in this rocky place, under a tree that gave a patch of shade. Their coming had found her out, and Cunmar the Procurator, who had held sway in Cadenas and promised so much to her, had not stepped in to protect them. The hours of Ophiri power in the outpost were numbered: for months after the foiled wedding the bride was kept in her room at the Keep, and denied access to her lord. Only Karim brought her news, news that was broken in pieces like a dropped water jar: one day, the Procurator was under Chrysaor’s control; then he was treating for his life. Another day, he was gone, back to Ophir to raise an army against the new authorities in Cadenas. On yet another occasion, she was told that Cunmar was dead. Never did he send word to her himself. Yet, when she heard a commotion from outside the walls of the Keep where she was held, she still hoped that he was there, that Cunmar the Terrible would carry her off in a surprise raid, such as he had conducted in the days of his glory.
But instead, when her condition could not be disguised, she was visited in her cell by a judge and two clerks, from the Lazuli court of justice, and sentenced: ‘No child of yours will survive to see the sunrise one more time. You are to be taken outside the city and there you shall die.’
The spirit of the child bride, once cowed by the violence at her nuptials, was now fired up by her impending motherhood; like a mother cat who crawls away to litter, she spat and hissed at the assassin they sent to fetch her – and she found herself fighting her friend, Karim, Cunmar’s bodyservant, screaming at him, ‘Turncoat’, and struggling until he too began cursing and crying out in a muddle of pain and pleading.
It is elementary statecraft that new rulers use the servants of the powers they have supplanted because those servants go in fear of their lives, and are willing to perform any deed, however cruel, to survive.
How clumsy Karim had been, treacherously carrying out his murderous errand, shrieking at her, foam flecking his lips as he pushed his face near hers, gibbering: ‘You’re to be killed, and your bastard with you.’ He was clownish, grappling with her with one hand and trying to stab her with the other, she thrashing and kicking: two drunkards flailing at each other and staggering. Had he thought she would come quietly? Did they all think she would not struggle under attack?
When she was living in the palace, she used to go down to the stables to help him groom Cunmar’s mare. When she observed the patience of the pack ponies and other, well-trained horses as they waited for their feed at the trough, she wanted to hit them. But hitting only made them meeker. Would they never rebel, toss the hay from the mangers in contempt, refuse to be pacified? In that cool arcaded precinct below the Keep, they munched the hay the stable lads baled for them, their tender velvet lips curling over the dry stalks, blowing through their quivering nostrils and inflating their bellies as they fed as if playing themselves like bagpipes. Leto would smell the sweetness in their feed, and her teeth would clench with impatience. That miserable supply was enough to keep them captive, standing and chomping on the same diet all winter long.
That is why I am not the same, Leto told herself, that is why a girl is not a mare. I will not be patient. I will not learn patience.
Karim did not know how to handle the girl as hard and round as a melon, who was about to give birth. He could not get a hold of her without feeling shame at his orders to seize her, and she took advantage of his awkwardness and was able to sink her teeth into his sword arm until the bone under the muscle stopped her bite. She clamped her jaws tight as she could and held on through his howling till the gouts of blood in her mouth sickened her. At fourteen, she still had sharp teeth; Leto still had a child’s fancies, and her favourite foods were fruit and sweets, which, though they do their own damage, do not blunt the ivory edges of incisors as meat does.
A guard had pulled her down the steps and into the street, heaved her up on to a cart where Karim was waiting for her – then a cloth, soaking wet and cold and minty, flopped on to her face; it was a nightsoil cart, with lidded buckets, but they still stank. Even through the gauze soaked in peppermint held over her mouth and nose, she caught whiffs of corrupt meats and hot fresh waste. Crazed Karim, her childhood, longtime friend, weeping at the order for her death, he had clutched her in a kind of embrace before he flung a scratchy blanket over her and began driving them out of the citadel.
Lying in the rocky place where he had left her, the young woman laughed; the sound was dry and clacked against her dry tongue. The death messenger, he who had been her ally, her childhood friend, he had accepted the errand. Cowards! All of them. Not to do it themselves. And to think she would not put up a fight.
When she looked outside the byre, she realised she was lying in a necropolis, among the tombs. He had taken pity on her, he told her: ‘I’m leaving you here, but I’m not going to kill you,’ he had said, putting his ear close to hers in fear that anyone might hear. But there were only wild animals to hear in the place where he left her and where her babies were born. Karim the intended killer had not been able, at the last, to fulfil his o
rders.
‘I can’t do this,’ he had screamed at her. ‘But if I leave you here, you can never come back. You must keep away.’
So Leto was spared death for herself and for her offspring, but cursed to wander on the face of the earth, one of the fugitives whom the fates cherish even while they are wanton with them, harrying them hither and yon as a cat bats a shrew for sport. She could imagine the equerry delivering his report: ‘Yes, my lady, you can rest assured that you will hear no more of Leto – or of any bastard brood born to her – she’s been disposed of – in the burial ground of . . .’ Maybe he had cut the heart from a calf to show her to prove it, a bloody lump – ‘This is all that remains of her, my lady.’ And the eyes of her enemy would glitter with satisfaction in her wrath and her vengeance.
There was a gash on her shoulder where the dagger had cut her on its passage towards her throat; it was when the dagger slipped and cut her shoulder that she had bitten him.
Now, that time since she’d been wounded stretched from where she lay under the sky to the farthest star.
[G. Fr. 73]
. . . flies droned near; she brushed them off the babies, but let them settle and buzz in her sweat and lesions, too tired to struggle against their persistence. She wished she could sink far below wakefulness, deep into the felted dark, where even a candle flame would sputter and fail in the saturated depths of that oblivion. And yet, deeper even than her yearning for no pain, for numbness, for death even, the nestlings at her flank lit a taper inside her: her mind was forming pictures of the future, of schemes she must attempt, of means she must use. These plans were physic; they administered a fluttering, winged medicine to her ordeals as her needs and her children’s began to assert their claims on her: she wanted water. She dreamed of a clean basin and a brimming ewer and linen napkins and talc and rosewater and lotion and dry, scented towels. The memory of a sweet taste rose in her throat, a buttered pancake flavour, runny with syrup, flavoured and sprinkled with almonds and pistachios as her nurse served in the mornings when she came in to wake her when she was a girl, installed by her lover in his palace. Its bathrooms – they made the kingdom where her lover ruled one of the most luxurious places in the world, so travellers from elsewhere and far afield marvelled.
She thought of her lover and she longed for him, she cleaved to him, in spite of everything, for he had trembled when he held her and made her own child’s body feel as tall as a thunderhead in its power over him.
A choking pain rose in her throat; and she fell back against the ground, anger and fear scorching her cheeks and neck as she clasped the girl child in her arms, lying alongside her son.
Consciousness came and went; she was drifting in and out of this place. where she found herself, where no lights in the distance guided her to human habitation. The late night air was soft-fingered, though, unlike the desert below the crag of the palace; so she was farther away than she had thought, somewhere near the coast and the warm onshore winds of the dunes and freshwater ponds trapped behind them. Water. Her tongue swelled against her palate and rasped and she was dreaming, ablaze with wanting to drink, to drink deep, to plunge into cool dark water and merge into its flow. She rolled on to her side; put out a hand to the baby boy she had laid down on the ground. He lay very still. She could have used one of his father’s slippers for a cradle, or hung it from her back and carried him in it. The boy had arrived after the girl; he was more purple-skinned and his matted curls kelp-dark; from his position he was staring up at her and his sister, unblinkingly as if she were as far away as the sky.
She probed her shoulder, where his tears and her blood had mingled. She was foul with her own emissions as well; her dress was stiff with stains, from the birth, from the struggle, from the flight. Again, pools of fresh water formed and smiled at her, calling to her with a sound of flutes and pipes and bells – to slip down and dance in their depths, to be washed clean.
She looked about her to get her bearings. She needed food, and clothes, too. For herself and for the infants. And people; people who might help the three of them.
They were in a stone building that had once served as a byre, perhaps, but had lost its roof and was no longer in use; the thin straw under them was grey and brittle. A twisted tree was growing from one corner, its crooked branches silhouetted like script in black ink against the sky, where the stars were fading now and a bird, far above the ground where she was huddled, was singing to the first light of dawn visible from its vantage point. It was trilling to another, who answered, displaying more frills and rills. She could not see them, though they sounded strong enough to pick her up in their beaks and soar upwards with her and the twins together.
She tried to puzzle out where she might be: it was March, so the dawn did not break very early. Though it felt to her as if she had been carted for a lifetime last night, the whole journey could not have taken longer than two hours; if she was right, and the mild warmth of the morning air indicated the presence of the sea, they must have taken the coast road – north? She only had her thin, silk slippers on her feet – the pair of indoor shoes embroidered in silver thread that she was wearing when the groom appeared in her bedroom with his orders and his knife. Her thirst scraped in her throat, worse than her hunger, she was lumpen with the sore weight of it; next time she fed the babies, they would empty her, drain her to a flaccid camel’s hump.
He had left her a water gourd, a blanket, a piece of bread, now crawling with ants. She wound the infants into the blanket, side by side, and felt her own eyes fill at the news of her own death. ‘Shame she was taken so young,’ some might murmur in her lover’s palace, while his wife’s lids would lower to hide her pleasure.
With her soft indoor feet and smooth hands Leto gave every indication of her status, she knew. There would be passers-by soon, coming to tend the graves of their loved ones perhaps, or on other business; she must try and appeal to them. It might anger them, that she brought them nothing but three mouths to feed. She felt at her neck – the gold chain and the phylactery her lover had given her, to protect her with a charm. She undid it with shaky hands and knotted it into a corner of the cloth Phoebe was wrapped in. Then she pulled her earrings free from her lobes, and tied them into her son’s meagre covering. She would conceal them until she had to trade – for milk, for apricots. She craved a ripe apricot. Or an orange.
Someone might see her once again as a bargaining counter, they might hold her for a possible ransom. She should try and convey this, before anyone did her and the babies harm.
But they could not stay where she’d been abandoned to give birth; the three of them needed to move from the cemetery. The sun would bake them; that single crooked tree gave no shade. She began to prepare herself to leave, before the sun rose higher. She dribbled some water from the gourd into her mouth and eyes, and tied one baby to her back and one to her breast; they were quiet, still stunned by their entry into the world; she was grateful for this, though it alarmed her, too, as if they might already be failing.
As she picked her way across the limestone, she remembered the scrap silver left by the city’s metalworkers: after they had punched out slugs to make charms for a bracelet, a curious, haphazard template was left behind which they melted down and used again. Could this be happening to all the dead who lay here in the higgledy-piggledy scattering of tombs? Would their flesh be melted down to be recast in another, perfected form?
Some more tombs, banked one above the other in ledges on one side of the area, were marked with sigils in the Greek style. They were hollowed out from the rocky outcrop that lay ahead of her and formed a natural amphitheatre, as if the dead lying in their sarcophagi on the shelves were an audience awaiting the grand spectacle of doom to begin on the stage towards which Leto was making her slow progress, her thin leather soles giving her no protection on the jagged stones and slithering on the larger, smoother slabs. Some of the rock tombs were sealed by blank stone; yet more were empty, awaiting occupancy or looted, dark gaps in the s
pongy rock. They would give shelter – and shade, Leto noted. In a cleft that ran slantwise across the rockface to its foot, she saw tufts of greener, bushier plants, marking a kind of trail; she made her way towards it, slowed by the difficulty of the ground.
She heard something shuffle and clatter, and stopped. A tortoise appeared, clambering, pigeon-toed over the uneven stones, manoeuvring to find the fulcrum of each obstacle beneath it, and toppling down into the crevice between, on to its back. It retracted its limbs, then began to wave them, scrabbling for purchase on the air above, its gnarled dark head twisting in panic. Leto found that she could still laugh at its plight, so much more helpless than her own; she bent to the yellow and black cryptic shell, and righted it. The tortoise pulled in its limbs, but she could see its eye, like light at the bottom of a well glinting on the surface of the black water. Did tortoises get thirsty? Was it heading for water?
She picked it up; it would make a first plaything for her babies. Then she continued to trudge towards the shade of the caves in the cliff-face . . .
6
Kim to Hortense
Subject: Re: Leto, You, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Date: Thurs, 18 June 199– 02.04:42 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Dear Hetty – you’ve seen how Leto lives on *after* she’s stoned to death you’ve read the strips that show her scrabbling to survive after that nasty little episode think of it this way think of her and the babies as stars whose light is reaching us only now across time you accept when you hear a thunderclap that the moment when the bolt of lightning fell happened a few moments before in class I get the children to count between the flash and the rumble and reckon it’s about a mile away a second if they’re scared imagining the distance takes their mind off it when you look at the distant stars Andromeda is the most faraway that you can see with the naked eye but you can’t in Enoch too yellow at night so I look at the sky on the web www.hubble.org when you’re looking into space you’re looking into time what you see happened a long while ago its called lookback time that’s like Leto and her two babies they happened a long time ago but their presence in the light is coming nearer all the time the actual speed is one foot a billionth of a second not too difficult to remember it was there and now it’s reached us through the bundle in the tomb
The Leto Bundle Page 17